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A robotic Volkswagen Passat shown at Stanford University is a driverless car (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The tech press in the USA typically refers to the driverless car as "the Google driverless car" and talks this up as an opportunity for the search giant to move beyond its current business model. I don't think so.

Here's why this opportunity is messy.

Driverless car projects have been around for 30 years. Anyone following European R&D in this area can easily cast their minds back to the DRIVE project, part of the EU's RACE program in the 1980s. And then the Eureka program's version: "the €800 million ECEUREKA Prometheus Project on autonomous vehicles (1987–1995)."

Chunka Mui has a series running here on Forbes about this disruptive business opportunity. Much as I respect Chunka's leadership in disruptive innovation thinking, the analysis is too US-centric. And the idea of a $2 trillion market in the US is overblown.

There's clearly something in the air around driverless cars. They are scary in prospect, though potentially safer than human driving but it is the business opportunity that is causing a stir. Is it a US opportunity or a Google opportunity?

European car makers began researching driverless cars thirty years ago because the European highways were already showing signs of being overburdened by the volume of traffic.

The 85-year-old company believes it can produce an accident free vehicle in just seven years. "Our vision is that no one is killed or injured in a new Volvo by 2020," said Anders Eugensson, Volvo's head of government affairs.